The Cotoni Coast Dairies National Monument, just north of Santa Cruz, brought a community together.
The author, left, with Hilltromper Managing Director Mike Kahn at the Cotoni Coast Dairies National Monument.
As Chris Neklason wrote last month, we envision California Local as a “civic engagement hub,” where we help our readers discover new things, connect with local leaders and each other, and take action.
For the record, this kind of journalistic project, maybe not defined exactly this way, has been my vocation for decades. Most journalists are in it for the “take action” part: We’re trying to have an impact on whatever communities we serve. I’m not bragging, but this is exactly what they teach us in journalism school, and I wish more people knew that.
Just a couple weeks ago, I had the pleasure of witnessing firsthand the kind of good thing that this kind of effort can yield. (Read A Monumental Morning at Cotoni-Coast Dairies on Hilltromper, CALocal's sister site.)
The unique 5,800-acre property now known as Cotoni Coast Dairies, located on Santa Cruz County’s north coast, was declared a national monument by Pres. Barack Obama just weeks before he left office in 2017. I took part in the effort to convince the president to make this declaration, a campaign that was initiated by the Sempervirens Fund, California’s oldest land trust.
At that time, Traci Hukill and I ran a website we named Hilltromper—“the nature- worshiping, fun-loving, adventurer's guide.” We were based in Santa Cruz, and we helped Sempervirens Fund make the case for the monument.
The campaign launched officially in February, 2015, with a rally that included a keynote address by Bruce Babbitt, a giant of the American conservation movement who served as U.S. Secretary of the Interior for eight years under Pres. Bill Clinton. Secretary Babbitt, a former two-term governor of Arizona, reinvented the Dept. of Interior and changed the focus of the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), long derided as the “Bureau of Livestock and Mines,” to concentrate more on land preservation and resource stewardship. As Clinton's Interior secretary, Babbitt encouraged his boss to designate 21 new national monuments, preserving several million acres of precious and threatened lands.
By the time of the campaign kickoff in the big arena where the Santa Cruz Warriors minor-league NBA team plays, the move to protect this beautiful piece of land was actually well underway. Thousands of Santa Cruz County residents had signed petitions asking for the designation, and dozens of local nonprofits and municipal governments had endorsed it. While local neighbors understandably voiced concerns that a National Monument in their backyard could bring unwanted traffic and other problems, the campaign that created this special place, thanks to a well-executed ground game, generated nearly universal support.
Our role at Hilltromper, leading up to and following the official kickoff, primarily involved discovery. Traci participated in the first BLM tour of the property and described it for our readers; we wrote about other National Monuments in California; we interviewed Babbitt and profiled him the day before the event. I believe we broke the news when "Cotoni" was added to the monument's name to honor the tribe that called the land home for 7,000 years.
One of these articles, published in April 2014, ran under this headline “At Last, Coast Dairies Transferred to BLM.“ That article quoted Mark Davidson, president of what was then the Mountain Bikers of Santa Cruz (MBoSC): “We’ve been waiting for over 15 years, and we’re ready to work with the BLM on the public access plan.”
When I visited Cotoni Coast Dairies a couple weeks ago, I walked on trails built by Santa Cruz Mountains Trail Stewardship, formerly MBoSC. A full quarter century after the effort to turn this land into a park officially began, it is now coming to fruition.
Last week’s tour, which was led by the Santa Cruz Museum of Natural History, was extra sweet for me, because I was joined by Mike Kahn, who is now running Hilltromper. Traci and I met Mike during the national monument campaign, when he was in charge of communications for Sempervirens Fund—we all worked closely together and, obviously, became friends. So this was a full circle more than a decade in the making. Sometimes good things take time.
Again, you can learn more and read A Monumental Morning at Cotoni-Coast Dairies, by clicking on that there link.
